You don't get to decide it's irrelevant just because you don't like it. Marketability plays a big role in transfer fees and player remuneration these days whether you want to accept that or not. It's a factor in the fee. Deal with it.
That's not to say it's the 'primary' reason, of course it isn't, longevity and bargaining power are other factors. You pay what you have to in order to get what you want, up to a limit.
For what it's worth the bitching about Lingard and social media is equally fecking dumb.
Again you're missing the point and trying to pin a price on something using only one metric of many and to make matters worse using a ludicrously small sample to do so.
I'm not dismissing it, he's in a poor run, but he's had plenty of good games as well and I'm not worried because it's obvious that he's suffering the consequence of a football filled summer and too many minutes this season.
People need to calm down.
Frankly Rado this marketability argument is one of the worst I've heard. You can tell me to deal with it and act like Pogba is akin to an F1 pay driver all you want, but I suspect if you offered this opinion to fans of any other club you'd be laughed at. I think it would be particularly amusing to Chelsea fans watching their team romp home to the title with a player signed for a third of what we paid for Pogba at the heart of their midfield that they were somehow missing out on some marketing masterstroke that they didn't splurge a world record fee on a midfielder who (with the best will in the world) isn't currently worth it. I'd rather we sign football players because they're good at football than because of their brand appeal.
Pogba is a football player bought to play football; the very fact we have to resort to some vague intangible accountancy to try and justify what we paid for what we got is itself an admittance that what he's doing where it counts isn't currently good enough?
And how much does it mitigate his performances? Knock £10m off the price? £20m, £30m? £40m? How marketable does he have to be to justify giving us comparatively less than, say, Alexis gives Arsenal?
Of course ultimately the numbers are currently irrelevant. We've bought a player who had a reputation as world class and paid what we thought he was worth for one reason: to improve our team here and now and in the future, and The issue is that he is failing to live up to that reputation, and he's struggling to make the expected improvements on the pitch. If you're not worried about him then bully for you, but the amount of goalposts you're having to shift to not worry about him does hint at the fact that maybe you expected more to start with too.
That hits the nail on the head in terms of my worries about him. Haven't seen it so put like that before but yeah, crystallises my concerns perfectly. It's the nagging feeling that an alternative, yet still very good, central midfielder with a bit less razzmatazz but a better execution of the basics would make us a far better team. There's shades of Nani in his approach. If you were playing with him you'd be equal parts awestruck at his talent and fecking infuriated by how often he gets caught out of position or gives the ball away for no good reason.
Yes my worry too. He was sold as a box to box player with the creativity of a 10 that would do both jobs simultaneously, but in reality he's a bit of one and a bit of the other, but doesn't do either well enough to have the sole responsibility for those tasks in the team. So we've already got Herrera doing the box-to-box duties to cover for Pogba because Pogba clearly can't do that, and I'm not at all convinced Mata would do a worse job if we replaced Pogba with him and played more of a 4-2-3-1.
All in all not a great posisition to be in with Pogba right now.
I hate that everything said in this post is what I can relate to when it comes to Pogba. If the season was to finished after last night, I'd rate Pogba as a big disappointment.